Subject & Curriculum Leaders

  • James Cameron (Subject Leader)
  • Gayle Scott (Trust Curriculum Leader)

Intent

‘The true value of sport is more than the skills that young people learn’

(Thomas Menino)

‘Physical exercise promotes positive self-image, high productivity and energetic well-being’

 (Lailah Gifty Akita)

‘It is really important that we promote competitive sport in schools. It is very important that we recognise that this has to be underpinned by good quality physical education and by getting people into patterns of exercise’

(Sebastian Coe)

At Hexham Middle School, we recognise the importance of Physical Education and the role it plays in promoting long-term healthy lifestyles, while making a positive impact on physical, mental and social health and well-being. We aim to ‘inspire a lifelong positive attitude to fitness, exercise and wellbeing, through enjoyment of an inclusive, broad and balanced curriculum’. We want the students at Hexham Middle School and to appreciate the benefits of a healthy and active lifestyle and create a sporting habit for life.

Throughout Key Stages 2 and 3 in Physical Education we intend to provide a curriculum that is broad, balanced, challenging, ambitious for all learners and fosters a life-long love of being physically active. The intent of our Physical Education curriculum is to provide all students with high quality PE provision, not only as a participant, but in leadership roles such as a coach or official. Our vision is for every pupil to succeed and achieve their potential, as well as to lead physically active lifestyles beyond their years at school. We strive to inspire our students through high quality, engaging PE lessons that are enjoyable, ambitious, and accessible to all and to embed a strong sporting culture across Hadrian Learning Trust. Through our teaching of PE, we will instil the Hadrian Learning Trust core values which are respect, engage and aspire, and provide opportunities to help embed other values such as resilience, fairness, integrity and determination, while raising self-confidence and esteem. Our core PE curriculum will be planned and sequenced to build student knowledge and understanding under three strands; motor competence, rules, tactics and strategies and healthy participation. Our PE curriculum offers students the opportunity to develop their practical sporting skills across a coherent and well-sequenced curriculum, building upon prior learning and knowledge, including the opportunity to study a diverse range of sports.

Our extensive extra-curricular programme (delivered during lunch breaks and after-school hours) is open to all students to attend on a competitive and recreational basis. Those wishing to play more competitively have further opportunities to represent the school locally, regionally and nationally in various sporting activities.

We hope that the pupils and students who study physical education at Hexham Middle School, can gain a rich understanding of the importance of leading a healthy, active lifestyle and are empowered with the key values we believe in.

Exercise not only changes your body, but it also changes your mind, your attitude and your mood.

Implementation

Aims of the National Curriculum for Physical Education

The national curriculum for physical education aims to ensure that all pupils:

  • develop competence to excel in a broad range of physical activities
  • are physically active for sustained periods of time
  • engage in competitive sports and activities
  • lead healthy, active lives

Key stage 2

Pupils should continue to apply and develop a broader range of skills, learning how to use them in different ways and to link them to make actions and sequences of movement. They should enjoy communicating, collaborating and competing with each other. They should develop an understanding of how to improve in different physical activities and sports and learn how to evaluate and recognise their own success.

Pupils should be taught to:

  • use running, jumping, throwing and catching in isolation and in combination
  • play competitive games, modified where appropriate [for example, badminton, basketball, cricket, football, hockey, netball, rounders and tennis], and apply basic principles suitable for attacking and defending
  • develop flexibility, strength, technique, control and balance [for example, through athletics and gymnastics]
  • perform dances using a range of movement patterns
  • take part in outdoor and adventurous activity challenges both individually and within a team
  • compare their performances with previous ones and demonstrate improvement to achieve their personal best

Swimming and water safety

All schools must provide swimming instruction either in key stage 1 or key stage 2.

In particular, pupils should be taught to:

  • swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres
  • use a range of strokes effectively [for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke]
  • perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations

 Key stage 3

Pupils should build on and embed the physical development and skills learned in key stages 1 and 2, become more competent, confident in their techniques, and apply them across different sports and physical activities. They should understand what makes a performance effective and how to apply these principles to their own and others’ work. They should develop the confidence and interest to get involved in exercise, sports and activities out of school and in later life and understand and apply the long-term health benefits of physical activity.

Pupils should be taught to:

  • use a range of tactics and strategies to overcome opponents in direct competition through team and individual games [for example, badminton, basketball, cricket, football, hockey, netball, rounders, rugby and tennis]
  • develop their technique and improve their performance in other competitive sports [for example, athletics and gymnastics]
  • perform dances using advanced dance techniques in a range of dance styles and forms
  • take part in outdoor and adventurous activities which present intellectual and physical challenges and be encouraged to work in a team, building on trust and developing skills to solve problems, either individually or as a group
  • analyse their performances compared to previous ones and demonstrate improvement to achieve their personal best
  • take part in competitive sports and activities outside school through community links or sports clubs 

The following table shows the increasingly challenging and complex delivery of PE across Hadrian Learning Trust. Our core PE long-term curriculum plan ensures that students access a range of individual and team sports, meeting the aims of the National Curriculum across a Key Stage, while being appropriate and supportive to our local context using sporting facilities at Hadrian Learning Trust. Students will be taught essential substantive knowledge within a domain-specific context, knowing how to perform skills and techniques in each activity. Students will be taught how the disciplinary knowledge referring to appropriate skill execution and selection of appropriate strategies and tactics, making connections between other sporting activities.

KS2 - Long Term Plan

KS3 Long Term Plan

Impact

To review the impact of our core physical education curriculum, formative assessments will take place within lessons to check student understanding of the substantive and disciplinary knowledge by questioning, discussion and observation of student performance in isolated, modified and competitive game situations. There will be summative assessments which will be used to assess a pupil’s holistic performance across a range of sporting activities based upon motor competence, rules, tactics and strategies, and awareness of healthy participation.

We will also gather student feedback based on our physical education curriculum and extra-curricular activities through student, parent and staff voice at timely intervals throughout the academic year.

SEND

All learners with additional needs access a broad and rich classroom experience with a well-planned curriculum both within and beyond the classroom. Pupils with additional needs are enabled to achieve well by:

      • High quality planning, teaching and learning across the curriculum.
      • Adaptations made in teaching and learning to ensure all pupils succeed and learn well.
      • Staff responding to learners’ needs and adapting teaching as a result.
      • Teaching staff planning and delivering a wide range of high-quality interventions and support sessions.
      • High-quality ‘Pupil Profiles’ which ensure staff know each child as an individual, including how to support their learning.
      • Where appropriate, an ‘Individual Education Plan’ with bespoke and individualised targets is implemented, and regularly reviewed.
      • For learners with an ‘Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP)’, a wide range of individualised targets and support strategies are implemented in a multi-agency approach.
      • Coordinating our ambitious support in school alongside a multi-agency approach to ensure that all pupils achieve their full potential.

As part of our implementation model – the ’10 Elements of Great Teaching’ – our teaching and support staff will enable pupils with additional needs to thrive by:

      • Planning well-sequenced lessons which build progressively in small steps.
      • Implementing the school’s lesson design principles so that teachers gradually handover the learning through guided and independent practice.
      • Maintaining a calm, focused, inclusive and positive environment for learning in all classrooms.
      • Implementing a wide range of strategies to empower pupils to remember more over time and to check that this is the case.
      • Using metacognitive strategies to encourage self-regulation and to plan, monitor and evaluate learning.
      • Delivering expectations and instructions clearly in small steps.
      • Teaching subject-specific vocabulary (tier 3), alongside tier 2 vocabulary, and ensuring that it is used and retained.
      • Using a wide range of teaching resources and materials to support all learners including visual and audio resources.
      • Using high-quality modelling in lessons through the ‘I do, we do, you do’ approach.
      • Using a wide range of scaffolds to support learning including writing frames, planning structures, word processing.
      • Providing high-quality worked examples which narrate the learning, steps and processes so that pupils develop their independence of learning.
      • Using organisers such as ‘Knowledge Organisers’, diagrams, planning structures and writing frames to support pupils’ learning.
      • Allowing pupils to record their ideas in a range of ways including, where necessary, by using online resources and visual/audio support.
      • Providing word lists/vocabulary banks to support pupils’ access to learning.
      • Using sentence stems to promote positive talk and discussion.
      • Using flexible groupings in the classroom so that pupils can learn alongside and from each other.
      • Implementing dyslexia-friendly approach to reading and writing tasks.
      • Modelling thinking out loud strategies across the curriculum.
      • Using a wide range of technologies including online resources, voice recording and visualisers to model worked examples.